Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
At an April 23 “Water Summit” at the White House, the Biden administration announced a multi-agency plan reasserting the federal role in determining the future of wetlands in the wake of last year’s landmark Supreme Court Decision limiting Washington’s authority to regulate “waters of the United States” (WOTUS).
At an April 23 “Water Summit” at the White House, the Biden administration announced a multi-agency plan reasserting the federal role in determining the future of wetlands in the wake of last year’s landmark Supreme Court Decision limiting Washington’s authority to regulate “waters of the United States” (WOTUS).
The administration’s move on wetlands appears to be part of a concerted effort to get as many rules and regulations as possible in place by the end of the year, in the event there is no second Biden term.
In April alone, the Biden Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued new rules setting stricter emissions standards for heavy-duty trucks, buses, and other vehicles by 2027, mandated steeper emissions cuts from new natural gas power plants and existing coal plants, and approved a California plan to mandate zero-emissions locomotives on all rail lines in the state by 2030, a move that could be adopted by like-minded states thereby crippling the nation’s vast freight rail network. Zero-emissions locomotives simply do not exist and are not likely to be by the arbitrarily set deadline.
“The America the Beautiful Freshwater Challenge: A Partnership to Conserve and Restore America’s Rivers, Lakes, Streams, and Wetlands sets a bold, new national goal to protect, restore, and reconnect 8 million acres of wetlands and 100,000 miles of our nation’s rivers and streams,” the White House said in a Fact Sheet.
“To achieve the new national freshwater protection goal and to ensure that our freshwater resources are protected for current and future generations as part of the America the Beautiful Freshwater Challenge, the Biden-Harris administration is also launching a new initiative that calls on states and other governments and entities, including Tribes, interstate organizations, cities, and local communities to advance their own policies and strategies for conserving and restoring America’s freshwater systems,” the White House said. “Over 100 inaugural members from across the country have signed on to support freshwater restoration in their communities, including ten states, eight Tribes, and 24 local governments.”
The initiative can be seen as part of the administration’s larger “30X30” plan, a scheme unveiled in January 2021 to “protect” at least 30% of the nation’s land and water by 2030. That plan was later dubbed “America the Beautiful,” a phrase that has now been incorporated in the new “America the Beautiful Freshwater Challenge.”
The 30X30 plan has run into stiff resistance at the state and local levels, where many rural community leaders fear it will bring federal control over land and water use decisions, as well as pose a threat to property rights.
For its part, the White House makes no secret that its latest wetlands initiative is in response to the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Sackett v. EPA, “which dramatically reduced federal protections for wetlands in one of the largest judicial rollbacks of environmental protections in U.S. history.”
In truth, the High Court clarified — at long last — the vague language of the 1972 Clean Water Act that had hitherto allowed EPA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to claim regulatory jurisdiction over millions of acres of wetlands and other isolated bodies of water with no direct connection to ”navigable waters of the United States.” The Supreme Court’s decision pulled the legal rug out from under the Biden administration’s plans to impose federal zoning on millions of acres of private and public land across the U.S. under the guise of protecting wetlands.
Other than announcing it will spend over $1 billion to improve drinking water quality on Tribal lands, $11 million to combat Western megadroughts, $70 million to upgrade dams, culverts, levees, and other water infrastructure, and $123 million for the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to expand its coastal management programs, the White House was vague about how it plans to reassert jurisdiction over wetlands. Administration officials must know that any move they make that violates the Supreme Court’s Sackett ruling will invite a flood of lawsuits.
Having proclaimed it is taking an “all of government” approach to what it says is a “climate crisis,” the Biden team is simply practicing what it preaches. All these moves will face stiff legal challenges in any event, so why not push the envelope on putting wetlands back under EPA’s control?
The BBC has been criticised for the colour scale it uses to represent temperatures, with lows of 11C shown as yellow while 41C is depicted as dark red.
The BBC has been criticised for the colour scale it uses to represent temperatures, with lows of 11C shown as yellow while 41C is depicted as dark red.
The broadcaster has triggered confusion among some viewers with its temperature contour map, which switches to orange when temperatures hit 13C.
The colour scheme was introduced in 2017, with the BBC at the time saying it was intended to help those with colour blindness.
Toby Young, the founder of website The Daily Sceptic, suggested that the BBC was “going a bit far”.
“How is it going to represent temperatures above 20C? Fireballs?” he said.
A weather forecast on Tuesday night showed most of the country yellow and orange for Wednesday when temperatures were predicted to hit as high as 20C.
One viewer wrote on social media that the system was “utterly farcical”.
“I’m not a massive conspiracy theorist but I have to agree with those who castigate the utterly ludicrous use of bright yellow and orange/red on the weather maps to indicate temperatures of 18/19 degrees!” the viewer wrote.
Another wrote that the BBC “need to give their heads a collective wobble”.
“Since when has 13C warranted yellow/orange on the weather map?!” the viewer wrote.
A BBC spokesman said: “The colours used now range from blue for the coldest temperatures through to red for the hottest temperatures as these colours are easier to see if you live with colour blindness.”
Last year, the broadcaster was forced to clarify its colour scheme after viewers suggested that it had increased the intensity of the map to raise alarm over increasing temperatures.
An image that went viral at the time contrasted a weather map from August 2003 showing temperatures up to 35C with an image from 2016 showing temperatures up to 33C.
The “greener” Germany gets, the bloodier its economy becomes. How much can an economy bleed before it dies?
Since Germany has become hostile to industry and its Green Revolution has made energy prices among the world’s highest, it’s no wonder that the country’s economy is hemorrhaging economically. Companies are shutting down and moving out.
Foreign direct investment from Germany into the United States from 2000 to 2022 (in billion U.S. dollars, on a historical-cost basis). Source: statista
For example, German online Blackout News here reports on how automotive supplier IHI has announced the closure of its plant at Erfurter Kreuz, Thuringia, and that around 300 employees will be affected in a region that is already struggling.
The company is an manufacturer of turbochargers for cars and intends to close the plant in 12 to 15 months, reports Blackout News.
The announcement is just the latest in a long, seemingly unending series of closures.
“In recent months, several automotive suppliers have had to close their doors or file for insolvency. This development shows the volatile challenges facing the industry,” comments Blackout News.
Analysts expect the demand for turbochargers, outfitted on internal combustion engines, will be less in the long term due to e-mobility.
Alarming economic pessimism trend
In more economic bad news for Germany, pessimism among small to medium size enterprises (SMEs), once the backbone of the German economy, has risen as the business climate index has fallen steeply to minus 1.4.
“The business climate index, an important barometer for the mood in small and medium-sized enterprises, fell to an alarming low of minus 1.4 points in February,” Blackout News reports here. “This is the lowest level since the financial crisis 15 years ago. A survey of around 1250 companies conducted by Creditreform Wirtschaftsforschung shows that the majority of respondents forecast a gloomy future for the SME sector.”
The latest figures show that there are no signs of hope for a recovery, “after the third year of crisis.”
Analysts blame a number of factors, such as the current weak construction and industrial production, geopolitical conflicts and “unclear economic policies”. The current Socialist-Green coalition government blames everyone else except for themselves.
The German government has shut down its remaining nuclear power plants after lying to the country in claiming that they weren’t needed – just after experts had concluded the opposite was in fact true. The government plans to phase out coal power plants as well, which will only further exacerbate Germany’s energy woes and its hostile business environment.
Georgia Power announced this week that the 1,114-megawatt (MW) Unit 4 nuclear power reactor at Plant Vogtle near Waynesboro, Georgia, entered into commercial operation after connecting to the power grid in March 2024. The commercial start of Unit 4 completes the 11-year expansion project at Plant Vogtle. No nuclear reactors are under construction now in the United States.
Georgia Power announced this week that the 1,114-megawatt (MW) Unit 4 nuclear power reactor at Plant Vogtle near Waynesboro, Georgia, entered into commercial operation after connecting to the power grid in March 2024. The commercial start of Unit 4 completes the 11-year expansion project at Plant Vogtle. No nuclear reactors are under construction now in the United States.
Vogtle Unit 3 began commercial operation in July 2023. The plant’s first two reactors, with a combined 2,430 MW of nameplate capacity, began operations in 1987 and 1989. The two new reactors bring Plant Vogtle’s total generating capacity to nearly 5 gigawatts (GW), surpassing the 4,210-MW Palo Verde plant in Arizona and making Vogtle’s four units the largest nuclear power plant in the United States.
Construction at the two new reactor sites began in 2009. Originally expected to cost $14 billion and begin commercial operation in 2016 (Vogtle 3) and in 2017 (Vogtle 4), the project ran into significant construction delays and cost overruns. Georgia Power now estimates the total cost of the project to be more than $30 billion.
The commercial operating date is when builders hand over a reactor to the plant owner or operator, declaring the reactor to be officially in commercial operation.
With a total installed capacity of about 97 GW, the largest commercial nuclear generating fleet of any country is located in the United States. The fleet of operating nuclear power reactors accounted for nearly 19% of domestic electricity production in 2023, making nuclear the second-largest source of U.S. electricity generation after natural gas, which accounted for 43% of electricity generation in the United States last year.
Electricity generation from nuclear reactors doesn’t produce CO2 emissions and can provide baseload power that would otherwise largely come from coal- and natural gas-fired plants. Although a number of nuclear reactors have retired in recent years, interest in nuclear power as an energy resource to help reduce the carbon footprint of the U.S. electric power sector has increased recently.
Both Vogtle Units 3 and 4 use a newer reactor design, the Westinghouse AP1000. This reactor has a smaller footprint and simpler design than previous generation reactor technologies. It also features passive safety systems that are intended to shut down the reactor without any operator action or external power source.
Vogtle Units 3 and 4 are the first and only U.S. deployments of the AP1000 Generation III+ reactor. Two other Westinghouse AP1000 reactors were planned for a nuclear power plant in South Carolina, but utilities there halted construction in 2017.
Weather-dependent generation sources are…weather dependent: Last year, despite adding 6.2 GW of new capacity, U.S. wind production dropped by 2.1%.
Damaged wind turbines at the Punta Lima wind project, Naguabo, Puerto Rico, 2018. Photo: Wikipedia.
Three years ago, in the wake of Winter Storm Uri, the alt-energy lobby and their many allies in the media made sure not to blame wind energy for the Texas blackouts. The American Clean Power Association (2021 revenue: $32.1 million) declared frozen wind turbines “did not cause the Texas power outages” because they were “not the primary cause of the blackouts. Most of the power that went offline was powered by gas or coal.”
NPR parroted that line, claiming, “Blaming wind and solar is a political move.” The Texas Tribune said it was wrong to blame alt-energy after Winter Storm Uri because “wind power was expected to make up only a fraction of what the state had planned for during the winter.” The outlet also quoted one academic who said that natural gas was “failing in the most spectacular fashion right now.” Texas Tribune went on to explain, “Only 7% of ERCOT’s forecasted winter capacity, or 6 gigawatts, was expected to come from various wind power sources across the state.”
Um, yes. It would. And the EIA made that point in its usual dry language. “Generation from wind turbines decreased for the first time since the mid-1990s in 2023 despite the addition of 6.2 GW of new wind capacity last year,” the agency reported. The EIA also explained that the capacity factor for America’s wind energy fleet, also known as the average utilization rate, “fell to an eight-year low of 33.5%.” That compares to 35.9% capacity factor in 2022 which was the all-time high. The report continued, “Lower wind speeds than normal affected wind generation in 2023, especially during the first half of the year when wind generation dropped by 14% compared with the same period in 2022.”
Read that again. For half of last year, wind generation was down by a whopping 14% due to lower wind speeds. Imagine if that wind drought continued for an entire year. That’s certainly possible. Recall that last summer, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation warned that U.S. generation capacity “is increasingly characterized as one that is sensitive to extreme, widespread, and long duration temperatures as well as wind and solar droughts.”
According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, corporate investment in wind energy between 2004 and 2022 totaled some $278 billion. In addition, according to data from the Treasury Department, the U.S. government spent more than $30 billion on the production tax credit over that same period. Thus, over the last two decades, the U.S. has spent more than $300 billion building 150 GW of wind capacity that has gobbled up massive amounts of land, garnered enormous (and bitter) opposition from rural Americans, and hasn’t gotten more efficient over time.
Wednesday’s EIA report is a stark reminder that all of that generation capacity is subject to the vagaries of the wind. Imagine if the U.S. had spent that same $300 billion on a weather-resilient form of generation, like, say, nuclear power. That’s relevant because Unit 4 at Plant Vogtle in Georgia came online on Monday. With that same $300 billion, the U.S. could have built 20, 30, or maybe even 40 GW of new nuclear reactors with a 92% capacity factor that wouldn’t rely on the whims of the wind. In addition, those dozens of reactors would have required a tiny fraction of the land now covered by thousands of viewshed-destroying, bat-and-bird-killing wind turbines.
If climate change means we will face more extreme weather in the years ahead — hotter, colder, and/or more severe temperatures for extended periods — it’s Total Bonkers CrazytownTM to make our electric grid dependent on the weather. But by lavishing staggering amounts of money on wind and solar energy, and in many cases, mandatingwind and solar, that’s precisely what we are doing.
There has been a lot in the press about the recent spike in global temperatures, and claims have followed about how this has caused the oceans to warm and the corals to bleach.
There has been a lot in the press about the recent spike in global temperatures, and claims have followed about how this has caused the oceans to warm and the corals to bleach.
There has been a spike in global temperatures as measured by the satellites since 1979, and there remains much regional and seasonal variability in this data. Furthermore, the same satellite data very clearly shows that the warmth is coming from the oceans, not from the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
The Australian Bureau Meteorology, among others, could easily issue a press release clarifying this. Of course, they don’t – because the Bureau’s leadership have an agenda, that this misinformation supports.
My friend Bill Kininmonth is a former Bureau employee – for more than a decade he headed Australia’s National Climate Centre and was a Bureau delegate to the Second World Climate Conference that culminated in the first IPCC report.
Kininmonth hasn’t stopped thinking. He wrote a book some years ago, and I have borrowed its title (Climate Change: A Natural Hazard) for this blog post, inspired by his note to me just this morning. It reads:
The charts for the sea surface skin temperature for the zonal band Lat 10S to Lat 10N as measured by satellites.
I have read media coverage of claimed ‘global’ coral bleaching that is being attributed to anthropogenic global warming. From the graphs it can be seen that neither the recent temperatures nor the temperature anomalies are the highest of the recent 45 years. The recent temperature spikes are, however, associated with a major El Nino event, which is rapidly decaying.
Your comment on the effect of spring tides is also of interest to me. I have long thought that part of the impact of El Nino, especially for the Great Barrier Reef, is that during these events sea levels across the equatorial Pacific Ocean change.
During the 1997-98 El Nino event sea level over the Western Pacific Ocean dropped about 35cm with an equivalent rise over the Eastern Pacific Ocean. Such a drop in sea level over the Great Barrier Reef would be expected to reduce the flow of cooling water over the reef and giving a greater response to solar heating of the shallow reef water. Lower spring tides would be expected to accentuate the heating of water over the shallow reefs.
On your point about SST (surface sea temperatures) being warmer than air temperature, this is confirmed in the chart of ocean skin temperatures versus air temperatures (see feature image).
The IPCC scientists do not seem to recognise that the greenhouse gases of the atmosphere radiate more energy than they absorb from the surface below.
Radiation processes are tending to cool the atmosphere at a rate of about 2C/day. This radiation cooling generates convective instability, allowing near-surface air to rise buoyantly in convective clouds. The radiation energy lost by the atmosphere is replaced by heat and latent energy flowing from the surface. As you comment, the atmosphere cannot warm the ocean!
Regards, Bill
****************************
It is important to understand the data, to think about it. It is also useful to test claims that it is possible to know the state of the corals from 150 metres altitude. I’ve been fortunate to have this opportunity, to live near the Great Barrier Reef, and to have friends with boats and even drones.
A drone aerial taken of me from an altitude of 40 metres a few years ago. I am looking down on a lot of very healthy coral, but you need to be in the water to actually see the coral. This aerial was taken by Stuart Ireland above Pixie Reef to the north east of Cairns, that Stuart regularly features at his Facebook page, including very recently, CLICK HERE. I am receiving emails about how I should realise that the scientists have done the aerial surveys and these prove that the Great Barrier Reef is 75% bleached. In fact, these surveys are done from an altitude of 150 metres from which it is difficult to actually conclude very much about the corals, even to see them.
It is the case that our institutions have become expert at promoting misinformation, and the mainstream media duly repeat it to the masses. Thank you for taking the time to read this note, and please consider subscribing for my weekly e-news, which is how Bill knew about my ‘recent post’, CLICK HERE.
On episode 108 of The Climate Realism Show, special guest James Taylor, president of The Heartland Institute and the founding director of Heartland’s Arthur B. Robinson Center for Climate and Environmental Policy, presents data refuting multiple climate change myths. James recently took part in a debate called “THE DUEL OF THE THEORIES ON GLOBAL WARMING” with Professor Harold R. Wanless, professor in the Department of Geography and Sustainable Development at the University of Miami.
On episode 108 of The Climate Realism Show, special guest James Taylor, president of The Heartland Institute and the founding director of Heartland’s Arthur B. Robinson Center for Climate and Environmental Policy, presents data refuting multiple climate change myths. James recently took part in a debate called “THE DUEL OF THE THEORIES ON GLOBAL WARMING” with Professor Harold R. Wanless, professor in the Department of Geography and Sustainable Development at the University of Miami.
Taylor covers topics such as global temperatures, sea level rise, crop production, hurricanes, and tornadoes, citing data from peer-reviewed sources in the process.
Join host Anthony Watts, and The Heartland Institute’s H. Sterling Burnett as we do some play-by-play analysis. Plus, as always, the Crazy Climate News of the Week. Join us LIVE at 1 p.m. ET (12 p.m. CT) for the kind of climate realism you can’t find anywhere else, and join the chat to get your questions answered, too.
In today’s EV obituary column, Elon Musk has dropped a bombshell. Two months after Telsa chargers became the industry standard (which promised to save the other car makers) his profits fell, and he’s fired the entire EV charging team overnight. Hertz, meanwhile, has realized that dumping 20,000 electric cars in January was not enough, and it has to offload another 10,000 electric cars, which now amounts to half its EV fleet.
Chronicling the collapse of the Big-Government-made EV bubble
In today’s EV obituary column, Elon Musk has dropped a bombshell. Two months after Telsa chargers became the industry standard (which promised to save the other car makers) his profits fell, and he’s fired the entire EV charging team overnight. Hertz, meanwhile, has realized that dumping 20,000 electric cars in January was not enough, and it has to offload another 10,000 electric cars, which now amounts to half its EV fleet. And then comes the news that there might be a secondhand “timebomb” coming at the eight year mark when most EV battery warranties run out and cars will become “impossible to sell”.
As if that’s not enough, this week the fire and rescue experts in NSW are warning in the politest possible way, that they might have to do a “tactical disengagement” of a car accident victim, which means leaving them to die in an EV fire if the battery looks likely to explode. They say that first responders need more training, as if this can be solved with a certificate, but the dark truth is that they’re talking about training the firemen and the truck drivers to recognize when they have to abandon the rescue.
The NSW government’s Electric and Hybrid Vehicle Batteries Inquiry heard testimony from fire and rescue services, paramedics, the Motor Traders’ Association, and TAFE on Tuesday in its second public hearing.
In the most serious incidents, firefighters said crews could be forced to abandon rescues or crudely rescue passengers from vehicles, and were being left “flying blind” at battery fires.
VRA Rescue NSW Commissioner Brenton Charlton told the inquiry worse outcomes were also possible, including battery explosions in which a rescue operation would put emergency workers at risk.
“We need to prepare ourselves and our volunteers… for the point in time we have to do a tactical disengagement, meaning if someone’s trapped and it does high order (explode) you might not be able to do anything,” he said.
“That will be a tragic, horrible thing to take part in.”
Just like that, Elon Musk fired the whole Tesla EV charging team, throwing the industry into chaos because Tesla network is the best by far and the bedrock of the so called “transition”. Tesla had agreed to open its charging network to other EV makers only recently, and Joe Biden was delighted. Tesla is getting subsidies to expand it’s North American Charging Standard (NACS) system. But this move has shaken the whole industry.
In a single stroke, CEO Elon Musk called his company’s vaunted charging reliability into question when he laid off most or all of Tesla’s Supercharger team, the people who made Tesla the envy of the EV industry. The network they built is bigger, faster, smarter and more reliable than any other company’s — and has become the linchpin of the auto industry’s plan to persuade millions of Americans to buy EVs and turn the tide on climate change.
“It feels like the rug just got pulled out from under a lot of the industry alignment that has been built in the last 12 months,” said Matt Teske, an industry veteran and CEO of Chargeway, an EV-charging software platform. “And leaves us on shaky ground.”
In 2022, as traditional automakers finally started delivering a substantial number of EVs to the roadways, they ran into a problem. Their drivers couldn’t use Tesla’s chargers, because they were meant only for Teslas. And the public networks had an array of reliability problems.
Ford was the first automaker to hit on the solution. Last spring, it struck a deal with Tesla to use its 12,000 U.S. charging stations and committed to building Tesla’s charging technology called the North American Charging Standard, or NACS, into its future vehicles.
Other automakers followed suit in short order. By February, Tesla’s NACS had become the industry standard, with virtually every automaker planning to redesign their charging systems to meet Tesla’s specifications.
Tesla still plans to grow the Supercharger network, just at a slower pace for new locations and more focus on 100% uptime and expansion of existing locations
And the crowd is baffled. People are mostly aghast…
The Hertz debacle truly might become an obituary
Originally Hertz was going to buy 100,000 wonder-cars which would be cheap to fix and popular with punters. But the future fleet only reached 60,000 cars and is now reversing back to 30,000 cars which tourists apparently don’t want to rent much, and which cost twice as much to repair.
Not surprisingly, it’s a financial ruin. Hertz shares have lost three quarters of their value since 2022.
The company was an $11 billion dollar company in 2021 when it announced the mass EV purchases — it is now a $1.4 billion dollar company.
RENTAL car giant Hertz, has announced that it is selling off 10,000 more EVs than it planned in January when it set out to stem the tide of massive depreciation that hit its fleet of 60,000 EVs.
Rental car companies need to be able to sell off their ex-rentals for a reasonable sum, but just as Hertz realized it couldn’t afford to repair these cars, it also realized it couldn’t sell them either:
…the program came under stress when Tesla began discounting its cars last year.
This set off a tsunami of depreciation for existing Tesla owners; including Hertz, which had the biggest exposure of anyone. In turn, other EV makers followed suit with discounts and retained values for all EVs became a race to the bottom.
And as word spreads, possibly no one else will be able to sell them either. What is an 8 year old EV with no battery warranty worth? It’s pot luck whether it will keep going or suddenly need a £15,000 repair…
The used electric car timebomb – EVs could become impossible to sell on because battery guarantees won’t last – find out if you are affected
By TOBY WALNE, This is Money
Money Mail can today reveal a timebomb looming in the second-hand market for electric vehicles (EVs).
Our investigation found that many EVs could become almost impossible to resell because of their limited battery life.
Experts said that the average EV battery guarantee lasts just eight years. After this time, the battery may lose power more quickly and so reduce mileage between charges.
In some cases, the cost of a replacement battery is as much as £40,000. For certain EVs, the cost of replacing the battery could be ten times the value of the vehicle itself on the second-hand market.
Yet geniuses in government still want to push us all into EV’s.
With uncanny timing the Australian Albanese government is about to launch emissions standards we don’t need to force people to buy a product they don’t want, in the hope, so they say, of stopping some storms.
Citigroup, among the more “progressive” (i.e., woke) financial institutions in the world, held their annual stockholder’s meeting on Tuesday. CFACT, which owns shares in the company, participated to ensure there was at least some pushback against this board’s radical green agenda – a topic that actually wound up dominating the discussions. In fact, the meeting even opened with the company bragging about their present meeting being less carbon intensive than others in the past.
Citigroup, among the more “progressive” (i.e., woke) financial institutions in the world, held their annual stockholder’s meeting on Tuesday. CFACT, which owns shares in the company, participated to ensure there was at least some pushback against this board’s radical green agenda – a topic that actually wound up dominating the discussions. In fact, the meeting even opened with the company bragging about their present meeting being less carbon intensive than others in the past.
CFACT’s Greg Neff confronted CEO Jane Fraser with a hard-hitting question that took aim at the company’s “$1 Trillion Sustainable Finance Goal”. In recent years, Citigroup announced a commitment to lend $1 trillion by 2030 in “sustainable financing,” which is a significant percentage of what the company is likely to lend out during that period. Neff asked Ms. Fraser, “In light of bank failures such as Silicon Valley Bank that prioritized ‘climate and sustainability’, shouldn’t Citigroup consider scaling back or eliminating its ‘$1 Trillion Sustainable Finance Goal’ in order to better protect its shareholders?”
Ms. Fraser responded with empty assurances that Citigroup’s finances were much more solid than some of those institutions that had fallen victim to prioritizing social policy ahead of sound economics. Said Fraser, through “our trillion-dollar sustainable finance goal, Citi is financing and facilitating a wide range of activities from renewable energy and clean technology to healthcare and affordable housing. And the goal contributes to the growth of scalable financial solutions to address environmental and social challenges.” She went on to boast that in the past three years, the company has already invested more than $440 billion in environmental and social activities.
This response by Ms. Fraser, of course, hardly satisfied CFACT’s concerns. By not giving any specifics and just pontificating about the merits of the company’s sustainable development goals with no concrete assurances other than the CEO’s good word that everything is “all under control,” there’s little reason shareholders shouldn’t be alarmed. One wonders if Sun Valley Trust’s CEO might have given the exact same type of answer Ms. Fraser did right before the company capitulated.
In any event, CFACT, as a stockholder in Citigroup, also had the opportunity to vote on several board and stockholder proposals during the gathering. On the friendly side, the first was from CFACT’s ally, the National Center for Public Policy Research, which asked the company to do a report disclosing the risk of the Citigroup’s DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) policies. This proposal was particularly timely in light of the recent Supreme Court ruling in SFFA v. Harvard that determined such policies violated the 14th Amendment. The second was from the American Family Association and called for the company to create a report explaining the risk of politicized debanking. Both only received about 2% support. While neither measure actually passed, and the Citigroup board urged everyone in attendance to vote against them, the message these groups were trying to deliver nevertheless was heard loud and clear. Let’s hope they make a future impact, as they often do despite their apparent lopsided results.
As it is now “shareholder season,” stay tuned for more updates soon. CFACT will continue to participate in shareholder activism in order to provide a counterbalance to the extreme ESG and “sustainable development” agendas that have sadly woven their way into America’s corporate boardrooms.
The climatists have seized on this unusual warming as proof their Zero Carbon agenda is needed, without addressing how impossible it would be for CO2 warming the air to raise ocean temperatures. It is the ocean that warms the air, not the other way around.
The best context for understanding decadal temperature changes comes from the world’s sea surface temperatures (SST), for several reasons:
The ocean covers 71% of the globe and drives average temperatures;
SSTs have a constant water content, (unlike air temperatures), so give a better reading of heat content variations;
Major El Ninos have been the dominant climate feature in recent years.
HadSST is generally regarded as the best of the global SST data sets, and so the temperature story here comes from that source. Previously I used HadSST3 for these reports, but Hadley Centre has made HadSST4 the priority, and v.3 will no longer be updated. HadSST4 is the same as v.3, except that the older data from ship water intake was re-estimated to be generally lower temperatures than shown in v.3. The effect is that v.4 has lower average anomalies for the baseline period 1961-1990, thereby showing higher current anomalies than v.3. This analysis concerns more recent time periods and depends on very similar differentials as those from v.3 despite higher absolute anomaly values in v.4. More on what distinguishes HadSST3 and 4 from other SST products at the end. The user guide for HadSST4 is here.
The Current Context
The chart below shows SST monthly anomalies as reported in HadSST4 starting in 2015 through March 2024. A global cooling pattern is seen clearly in the Tropics since its peak in 2016, joined by NH and SH cycling downward since 2016.
Note that in 2015-2016 the Tropics and SH peaked in between two summer NH spikes. That pattern repeated in 2019-2020 with a lesser Tropics peak and SH bump, but with higher NH spikes. By end of 2020, cooler SSTs in all regions took the Global anomaly well below the mean for this period.
Then in 2022, another strong NH summer spike peaked in August, but this time both the Tropic and SH were countervailing, resulting in only slight Global warming, later receding to the mean. Oct./Nov. temps dropped in NH and the Tropics took the Global anomaly below the average for this period. After an uptick in December, temps in January 2023 dropped everywhere, strongest in NH, with the Global anomaly further below the mean since 2015.
Then came El Nino as shown by the upward spike in the Tropics since January, the anomaly nearly tripling from 0.38C to 1.09C. In September 2023, all regions rose, especially NH up from 0.70C to 1.41C, pulling up the global anomaly to a new high for this period. By December, NH cooled to 1.1C and the Global anomaly down to 0.94C from its peak of 1.10C, despite slight warming in SH and Tropics.
Then in January both Tropics and SH rose, resulting Global Anomaly going higher. Tropics anomaly reached a new peak of 1.29C. and all ocean regions were higher than 01/2016, the previous peak. Now in February and March all regions have cooled bringing the Global anomaly back down 0.18C from its September peak.
Comment:
The climatists have seized on this unusual warming as proof their Zero Carbon agenda is needed, without addressing how impossible it would be for CO2 warming the air to raise ocean temperatures. It is the ocean that warms the air, not the other way around. Recently Steven Koonin had this to say about the phonomenon confirmed in the graph above:
El Nino is a phenomenon in the climate system that happens once every four or five years. Heat builds up in the equatorial Pacific to the west of Indonesia and so on. Then when enough of it builds up it surges across the Pacific and changes the currents and the winds. As it surges toward South America it was discovered and named in the 19th century It is well understood at this point that the phenomenon has nothing to do with CO2.
Now people talk about changes in that phenomena as a result of CO2 but it’s there in the climate system already and when it happens it influences weather all over the world. We feel it when it gets rainier in Southern California for example. So for the last 3 years we have been in the opposite of an El Nino, a La Nina, part of the reason people think the West Coast has been in drought.
It has now shifted in the last months to an El Nino condition that warms the globe and is thought to contribute to this Spike we have seen. But there are other contributions as well. One of the most surprising ones is that back in January of 2022 an enormous underwater volcano went off in Tonga and it put up a lot of water vapor into the upper atmosphere. It increased the upper atmosphere of water vapor by about 10 percent, and that’s a warming effect, and it may be that is contributing to why the spike is so high.
A longer view of SSTs
The graph above is noisy, but the density is needed to see the seasonal patterns in the oceanic fluctuations. Previous posts focused on the rise and fall of the last El Nino starting in 2015. This post adds a longer view, encompassing the significant 1998 El Nino and since. The color schemes are retained for Global, Tropics, NH and SH anomalies. Despite the longer time frame, I have kept the monthly data (rather than yearly averages) because of interesting shifts between January and July. 1995 is a reasonable (ENSO neutral) starting point prior to the first El Nino.
The sharp Tropical rise peaking in 1998 is dominant in the record, starting Jan. ’97 to pull up SSTs uniformly before returning to the same level Jan. ’99. There were strong cool periods before and after the 1998 El Nino event. Then SSTs in all regions returned to the mean in 2001-2.
SSTS fluctuate around the mean until 2007, when another, smaller ENSO event occurs. There is cooling 2007-8, a lower peak warming in 2009-10, following by cooling in 2011-12. Again SSTs are average 2013-14.
Now a different pattern appears. The Tropics cooled sharply to Jan 11, then rise steadily for 4 years to Jan 15, at which point the most recent major El Nino takes off. But this time in contrast to ’97-’99, the Northern Hemisphere produces peaks every summer pulling up the Global average. In fact, these NH peaks appear every July starting in 2003, growing stronger to produce 3 massive highs in 2014, 15 and 16. NH July 2017 was only slightly lower, and a fifth NH peak still lower in Sept. 2018.
The highest summer NH peaks came in 2019 and 2020, only this time the Tropics and SH were offsetting rather adding to the warming. (Note: these are high anomalies on top of the highest absolute temps in the NH.) Since 2014 SH has played a moderating role, offsetting the NH warming pulses. After September 2020 temps dropped off down until February 2021. In 2021-22 there were again summer NH spikes, but in 2022 moderated first by cooling Tropics and SH SSTs, then in October to January 2023 by deeper cooling in NH and Tropics.
Then in 2023 the Tropics flipped from below to well above average, while NH produced a summer peak extending into September higher than any previous year. Despite El Nino driving the Tropics January 2024 anomaly higher than 1998 and 2016 peaks, the last two months cooled in all regions, especially the Tropics, suggesting that the peak likely has been reached.
What to make of all this? The patterns suggest that in addition to El Ninos in the Pacific driving the Tropic SSTs, something else is going on in the NH. The obvious culprit is the North Atlantic, since I have seen this sort of pulsing before. After reading some papers by David Dilley, I confirmed his observation of Atlantic pulses into the Arctic every 8 to 10 years.
Contemporary AMO Observations
Through January 2023 I depended on the Kaplan AMO Index (not smoothed, not detrended) for N. Atlantic observations. But it is no longer being updated, and NOAA says they don’t know its future. So I find that ERSSTv5 AMO dataset has data through October. It differs from Kaplan, which reported average absolute temps measured in N. Atlantic. “ERSST5 AMO follows Trenberth and Shea (2006) proposal to use the NA region EQ-60°N, 0°-80°W and subtract the global rise of SST 60°S-60°N to obtain a measure of the internal variability, arguing that the effect of external forcing on the North Atlantic should be similar to the effect on the other oceans.” So the values represent sst anomaly differences between the N. Atlantic and the Global ocean.
The chart above confirms what Kaplan also showed. As August is the hottest month for the N. Atlantic, its varibility, high and low, drives the annual results for this basin. Note also the peaks in 2010, lows after 2014, and a rise in 2021. Now in 2023 the peak was holding at 1.4C before declining. An annual chart below is informative:
Note the difference between blue/green years, beige/brown, and purple/red years. 2010, 2021, 2022 all peaked strongly in August or September. 1998 and 2007 were mildly warm. 2016 and 2018 were matching or cooler than the global average. 2023 started out slightly warm, then rose steadily to an extraordinary peak in July. August to October were only slightly lower, but by December cooled by ~0.4C. January 2024 was unchanged from the previous month, but February anomaly rose 0.1C and March a little more to reach 1.2C anomaly.
The pattern suggests the ocean may be demonstrating a stairstep pattern like that we have also seen in HadCRUT4.
The purple line is the average anomaly 1980-1996 inclusive, value 0.18. The orange line the average 1980-202306, value 0.38, also for the period 1997-2012. The red line is 2013-202306, value 0.64. As noted above, these rising stages are driven by the combined warming in the Tropics and NH, including both Pacific and Atlantic basins.
The oceans are driving the warming this century. SSTs took a step up with the 1998 El Nino and have stayed there with help from the North Atlantic, and more recently the Pacific northern “Blob.” The ocean surfaces are releasing a lot of energy, warming the air, but eventually will have a cooling effect. The decline after 1937 was rapid by comparison, so one wonders: How long can the oceans keep this up? And is the sun adding forcing to this process?
Space weather impacts the ionosphere in this animation. Credits: NASA/GSFC/CIL/Krystofer Kim
Footnote: Why Rely on HadSST4
HadSST is distinguished from other SST products because HadCRU (Hadley Climatic Research Unit) does not engage in SST interpolation, i.e. infilling estimated anomalies into grid cells lacking sufficient sampling in a given month. From reading the documentation and from queries to Met Office, this is their procedure.
HadSST4 imports data from gridcells containing ocean, excluding land cells. From past records, they have calculated daily and monthly average readings for each grid cell for the period 1961 to 1990. Those temperatures form the baseline from which anomalies are calculated.
In a given month, each gridcell with sufficient sampling is averaged for the month and then the baseline value for that cell and that month is subtracted, resulting in the monthly anomaly for that cell. All cells with monthly anomalies are averaged to produce global, hemispheric and tropical anomalies for the month, based on the cells in those locations. For example, Tropics averages include ocean grid cells lying between latitudes 20N and 20S.
Gridcells lacking sufficient sampling that month are left out of the averaging, and the uncertainty from such missing data is estimated. IMO that is more reasonable than inventing data to infill. And it seems that the Global Drifter Array displayed in the top image is providing more uniform coverage of the oceans than in the past.
USS Pearl Harbor deploys Global Drifter Buoys in Pacific Ocean
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